FIRST FLIGHTS

Books about adventurous women and girls caught my attention when I was young. Anne of Green Gables, Nancy Drew, Mary Poppins, and Jane Eyre all led me to think that nothing was impossible. I often told stories to myself with me as the main adventuresome character. It didn't occur to me in college that almost all the books I read were written by men. I assumed that women could do as well and found Virginia Woolf, Jane Austin and the Bronte sisters to be my examples.

Recently I picked up Sara Ackerman's The Uncharted Flight of Olivia West, an historical fiction novel about the Dole Air Race, a real event that happened in 1927. I had never heard of the race from San Francisco to Hawaii. Though Amelia Earhart didn't participate, her story and those of other female pilots at the time became an inspiration for the author. No one had charted the navigation for pilots to cross the Pacific and land on the islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The navigators needed to use sextants and stay awake for over 20 hours to stay on what they hoped was the course to arrive on the islands. The race included thirteen planes, their pilots, and navigators, all men, since women pilots were excluded. 

The fictional Olivia West learned to fly after a childhood with her fisherman father who taught her about navigating the ocean. West used those tools to navigate the plane she flew to Hawaii. In the actual race, only two of the thirteen planes made it to the islands. Some had mechanical difficulties and returned to San Francisco, a couple crashed and the pilots were killed, and some flew off and were never heard from again, including the one plane with a woman passenger on it. Not a very satisfying ending to what had been heralded as a great race.

I had a hard time at first reading the story. Writers of historical fiction have been following a trend of writing two stories at once. In Ackerman's case, she alternates chapters between the original story of the race, and a later story of a young woman who finds West's plane in Hawaii. I kept losing the momentum of each story. I stopped and started again and read each story separately. A far better story read as two!

The Housekeepers by Alex Hay reminded me of an "Ocean's Eleven" film, with the main characters from "below the stairs" of a manor house, plotting to rob the house of everything during a huge party, hoping to leave it completely bare as a statement for and about the manor's owners. There are lots of twists in the story about who is related to whom in the story.

Two more books to recommend: Moiya McTier, an astrophysicist, wrote An Autobiography of Our Galaxy, the Milk Way, as a way to explain the creation of our universe through the "eyes" of the Milky Way, a sardonic narrator. Alice McDermott's Absolution is a tale about young wives who move with their husbands to Vietnam as the U.S. becomes more and more involved in the civil war there. Her portrayal of life in a unfamiliar country reminds me of our time in Tokyo.

Check out the Dole Air Race here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dole_Air_Race